ONEART Gallery & Letravia Intercultural
ONEART Gallery & LETRAVIA Intercultural (Beijing + Barcelona)
ONEART GALLERY, BEIJING, Founded in Beijing in 2023, ONEART Gallery is driven by a new generation committed to a long-term vision for the contemporary art landscape. Dedicated to supporting outstanding emerging artists on a global scale, the gallery fosters meaningful cultural exchange between East and West while building lasting relationships between artists and collectors. With a focus on sustainability, dialogue, and growth, ONEART Gallery positions itself as both a platform and an advocate for the next wave of contemporary artistic voices.
Letravia Intercultural is an intercultural platform based in Barcelona, Spain, dedicated to building creative bridges between Barcelona and China while engaging with the broader Sinophone world. At the intersection of art, literature, education, and academia, Letravia designs human-centred, interdisciplinary initiatives grounded in learning and intercultural dialogue. By bringing together individuals, institutions, and communities, it fosters sustained exchange, meaningful collaboration, and deeper mutual understanding.
Proposal
Unfamiliar Soil examines how living systems, materials, and imaginaries negotiate belonging under unstable conditions. It explores acclimatization through displacement and the gradual transformation of unfamiliar environments into inhabitable spaces. In Chinese thought, shuitu (水土), “water and soil,” evokes territory, climate, ecological adaptation, and the intimate bond between body and environment. It reflects how place shapes perception, memory, habit, and ways of dwelling. Echoing Heidegger, the project understands belonging not as permanence or possession, but as a fragile process of inhabitation. Bringing together Manu VB Tintoré’s territorial imaginaries and Liu Wenqi’s microscopic sensibility, it frames belonging as ongoing negotiation and adaptation.
Liu Wenqi (Shanghai, 1985) is a Paris-based Chinese artist whose ceramic practice explores the subtle relationships between materiality, perception, memory, and the invisible dynamics that shape human experience. Trained in animation and fashion design before developing an independent artistic practice in ceramics, Liu approaches porcelain as both a material language and a space of inquiry, where texture, light, fragility, and sensory perception become vehicles for reflection. Working through serial forms and
delicate material experimentation, her work investigates the thresholds between abstraction and figuration, presence and absence, intimacy and environment. Rather than treating matter as an inert substance, Liu conceives ceramic surfaces as sensitive fields through which relationships, between self and world, object and viewer, nature and imagination, quietly emerge. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Joseph Déchelette Museum.
Manu VB Tintoré (Brussels, 1964) is a Catalonia-based painter and sculptor whose practice explores the entangled relationships between human beings, territory, and the fragile mechanisms through which nature is perceived, inhabited, appropriated, and imagined. Trained in Fine Arts at the School of Art and Design of Olot after more than a decade working as an agricultural engineer with NGOs and the United Nations across Latin America and Africa, Tintoré brings to his artistic practice a singular convergence of ecological awareness, spatial observation, and lived geopolitical experience. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and site-responsive interventions, his oeuvre unfolds as a sustained inquiry into landscape as a contested space of memory, displacement, vulnerability, and coexistence. Rather than treating nature as scenery or representation, Tintoré approaches it as a field of negotiation, where belonging, fragility, human intervention, and alterity continuously intersect. His work has been exhibited internationally across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
